Professional Documents
Culture Documents
UNIVERSITY 01
CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO
8 83? C?
N DIEGO
S
I llll llll III
822 011
•* W - .-•«- —
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
AGENTS
America . . The Macmillan Company
64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Australasia The Oxford University Press
205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
IDEALISM
BY
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1913
PREFACE
What attempted in this book is an examination
is
significance.
In the opening chapter and elsewhere, both in
the text and in the footnotes, I have put together
some things about the development and the
affiliations of Pragmatism, and of pragmatist
tendencies, that may not be altogether new to
the professional student. Such a presentation, or
general conspectus, I have found to be a necessity
in the way of a basis for discussion and for
both
rational comprehension. Taken along with the
original pronouncements of James and his confreres
vi PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
it affords an indication of the philosophy to which
the pragmatists would fain attain, and of the
modification of rationalistic philosophy they would
fain effect.
The chapter upon Pragmatism as Americanism
isput forth in the most tentative spirit possible,
and I have thought more than once of withholding
it. Something in this
connexion, however, is,
in my opinion, needed to cause us to regard the
pragmatist philosophy as resting upon a very real
tendency of the civilized world of to-day a —
tendency that is affecting us all whether we like
it or not.
The chapter upon Pragmatism and Anglo-
Hegelian Rationalism is also offered with some
degree of reservation and misgiving, for, like
many of my contemporaries, I owe nearly every-
thing in the way of my introduction to philosophy
to the great Neo - Kantian and Neo - Hegelian
movement. In its place, I had some months ago
a more general chapter upon Pragmatism and
Rationalism, containing the results of material
that I had been elaborating upon the develop-
ment of English Neo-Hegelianism. At the last
moment I substituted what is here offered upon
the significant high-water output of Hegelianism
represented in Dr. Bosanquet's Edinburgh Gifford
Lectures.
In regard to the note upon the Pragmatist
elements in the philosophy of Bergson I ought,
perhaps, to say that I kept away from Bergson's
PREFACE vii
University of Edinburgh ;
Professor P. T. Lafleur
of M'Gill University. I also owe much in this
same connexion to recent conversations with
Professors A. Lalande and D. Parodi of Paris,
IX.
of Bergson ......
Pragmatism and Idealism in the Philosophy
234
INDEX 267
IX
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles
in the Archiv fiir Philos<yphie (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that
we have had nothing like it [as a movement '] " since Nietzsche "
'
practical consequences.
He
has also, along with his brother-pragmatists,
raised the question of the nature of Truth, attain-
ing to such important results as the following :
" "
expedient in the way of thinking, as the right
is the expedient 1
in the way of acting, and so
on.
Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism
leaves us with the main body of our common-sense
beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing],
such as the belief in
"
freedom
"
as a
" —
promise
and a relief," he adds and the belief in the
;
"
religious outlook upon life, in so far as it works."
This is the attitude and the tenor of the well-
known books on The Will Believe and The
to
"
Varieties of Religious Experience. Our acts, 2,
"
the pragmatist lives in the world of possibilities."
These words show clearly how difficult it is to
1
Pragmatism, p. 300.
INTRODUCTORY 9
1
Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth
(p. 243) "It may be that the truest of
: be that in
all beliefs shall
transsubjective realities."
io PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
"It gets rid of the standing problems of Monism and
of other metaphysical systems and paradoxes." 1
Professor James exhibits, however, at the same
time a very imperfect conception of philosophy,
"
holding that it gives us, in general, no new range
of practical power," ignoring, as it were, the
difference between philosophy and poetry and
religion and mere personal enthusiasm. And he
leaves the whole question of the first principles of
both knowledge and conduct practically unsettled.
These things are to him but conceptual tools, 2
"
and " working points of departure for our efforts,
and there seems in his books to be no way of reduc-
ing them to any kind of system. And he makes,
lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt at a theory
of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a
" "
moving equilibrium of experience, the flux we
have already referred to sometimes the fleeting ;
tially irreligious,"
2
although it was fostered at first
3
in for essentially religious purposes. It
England
has developed there now at last, us, a he reminds
4
powerful left wing which, as formerly in Germany,
See p. 159 and p. 212.
1
"
As for Dr. Schiller's charge that Absolutism is essentially irre-
2
"
ligious in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious
at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly
in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irre-
ligious in both Germany and England.
3 aware that it was the
British students of philosophy are quite well
religious and the motive that seemed to weigh most with
spiritual
Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty
years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their
fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working
correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird's
animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel,
and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel's treatment of
Kant's theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green
"
the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a spiritual
" " " "
principle in nature," and in knowledge," and in conduct," a
principle which rendered absurd the
naturalism of the evolutionary
philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German
Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the
books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the
Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers.
4
The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of
British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appear-
ance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of
14 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolu-
tism, the two phases of Deity God as moral —
principle, and God as an intellectual principle —
"
fall apart," and absolutist metaphysic has really
no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism
" "
can renew Hegelianism by treating the making
of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom
"
is real, and may possibly
*
pervade the universe."
All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of
the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason
together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really
essential and integral features in real knowing,
and if knowing, as above, really transforms our
"
experience, they must be treated as real forces,"
which cannot be ignored by philosophy. 2
Against all this would-be positive, or con-
structive, philosophy we must, however, record
the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller breaks
down altogether in the matter of the recognition
" '
they will
probably be more brilliant in colouring
and more attractive in their form, for they will
certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged
as works of art that bear the impress of a unique
and individual soul." 1
The main result of pragmatist considerations
in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that re-
consideration of the problems of logic and know-
ledge in the light of the facts of genetic and
functional psychology which has now become
fairly general on the part of English and American
students of philosophy. It is through his influence
generally that pragmatists seem always to be
" '
1
Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this para-
Studies in
graph have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent
will
1 See
p. 106.
2
See Professor Bawden's book upon Pragmatism.
2
18 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
man will find in Schiller a treatment of philosophy
as the
justification an essentially spiritual
of
"
Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform
at specific need, just as at other times we engage
in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend,
draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner,
"
Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an
assertion claims truth, its consequences are always
used to test its claims that (2) the truth of an
;
everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolu-
tionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual re-
actions in their segregation, but in something general or con-
tinuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that the coalescence,
the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the
becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and
"
the same process of the growth of reasonableness (ibid. p. 322.
From Dr. Peirce, the bracket clauses being the author's).
"
(4) It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical
thinking.
These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances —
and we must never forget that even to the Greeks
philosophy was always something of a religion or
—
a life may be paralleled by some of the more
enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of
" " "
Dr. Schiller about
voluntarism or meta-
" "
physical personalism as the one courageous,"
and the only potent, philosophy or about the ;
" "
storming of the Jericho of rationalism by the
" " " "
jeers and the trumpetings of the confident
humanists and their pragmatic confreres. The
underlying element of truth in them, and, for that
part of it, in many of the similar utterances of
of Absolutism, p. 230.
26 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
ments 1 of the free, creative religion hinted by
Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn declaration
"
of Professor James that the programme of the
man-god one of the great type programmes of
is
" "
philosophy," and that he himself had been slow
in coming to a perception of the full inwardness
of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself
to a new
doctrine which was trumpeted there a
" 2
year or two ago in the public press as Futurism,"
" "
in which courage, audacity and rebellion were
the essential elements, and which could not
" "
abide the mere mention of such things as
" "
"
priests and " ideals and " professors " and
11
moralism." The extravagances of Prezzolini,
"
who thinks of man as a sentimental gorilla,"
were apparently the latest outcome of this
anarchical individualism and practicalism. Prag-
matism was converted by him into a sophisticated
opportunism and a modern Machiavellism, a
method of attaining contentment in one's life
and of dominating one's fellow-creatures by play-
ing upon their fancies and prejudices as does the
religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the
rhetorician.
The reader who may care to contemplate all
See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme el Modemisme, and W. Riley in the
1
Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 191 1 the James article, Journ. of
;
"
Phil., 1906 ;Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26-37, on Papini's Introduction
"
to Pragmatism The Nation (N.Y.), November 1907, on " Papini's
;
' '
view of the daily tragedy of life."
2
Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet,
Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this
" "
Futurism with the present Art movement bearing the same name I
know nothing definite.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 27
con-
ceptions of religion. One of these writers, for
example, in a recent important commemorative
volume, tries to show how this may be done by
1
" "
interpreting the supernatural," not as the trans-
1
refer to the recent volume dedicated some of his old
—a celebrated teacher ofbyphilosophy in one pupils
I
theology." And
would not be difficult to find
it
3 —
Even such a book and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and
—
a noteworthy book as Harold H. Begbie's Twice-born Men is pointed
to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles
in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way,
was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of
affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to over-
come the selfish will to live. See my Schopenhauer's System in its
Philosophical Significance.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 29
" "
(1) the
"
freedom and " indeterminism philo-
sophy of Renouvier 2
and other members of the
See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the
1
2
H. Poincare (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the
greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago),
so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important
"
scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the logic of
hypotheses," and of the "hypothetical method" in science the —
method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy.
He seems (see his La Science et VHypothese, as well as the later book,
La Valeur de la Science, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports
to the Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the
" "
hypothetical character of the constructions of both the mathe-
matical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time
" "
that we must not be unduly sceptical about their conclusions,
"
revealing as they do something of the nature of reality." He dis-
" "
cusses among other topics the theory of energetics of which we speak
below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the
" " "
real is known only by experience," and that this experience
includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he
believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori element
in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite un-
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 31
of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A
doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve
the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or
"
of the exigencies of dogma.' Le Roy, by the way, has published a book
upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon
the subject. It has been translated into English.
2 M. Abel
Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical Science in
the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Thiorie de la physique chez
les physiciens contemporains). In this book (I have not had the time
to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods
of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald,
reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science
"
is most compatible is a modified form of Positivism," which bears a
" "
striking resemblance to Pragmatism and the " philosophy of ex-
perience." The English reader will find many useful references to Rey
in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker's Theories of Knowledge, in
the " Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series."
8
Ibidem.
32 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
definitely bears the name of Pragmatism, that of
M. Blondel, 1 who in 1893 wrote a suggestive work
entitled V
Action, and who claims to have coined
the word Pragmatism, after much careful con-
siderationand discrimination, as early as 1888
— many years before the California pamphlet of
James.
The first of these points of correspondence or
relationship we can pass over with the remark that
we have a good deal to say about the advant-
shall
3
34 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
of philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with
that which Mr. Peirce follows in How to Make
Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel " does not
continue in the same manner, and his conclusion
is very different. Rejecting all philosophical
formalism, he puts his trust in moral experience,
and consults it directly. He thinks that moral
experience shows that action is not wholly self-
contained, but that it presupposes a reality which
transcends the world in which we participate." x
"
Finally, maintains M. Blondel, we are unable,
as Pascal already said, either to live, or to under-
stand ourselves, by ourselves alone. So that, unless
we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnest-
ness of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in
ourselves the presence of God. Our problem,
therefore, can only be solved by an act of absolute
faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case].
This completes the series of acts of faith, without
which no action, not even our daily acts, could
be accomplished, and without which we should
fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and
2
intellectual."
I am inclined to attach a great
1
importance to this idea (Kant
"
obviously had it) of consulting moral experience directly," provided
" "
only that the moral in our experience is not too rigidly separated
from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the
credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to
do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a
" "
reality that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a
reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but
too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223,
where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience
directly.
2
Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 35
Now
again these words about our being unable
" "
to understand ourselves by ourselves alone
contain an element of truth which we may associate
with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a
socialized (as distinguished from an individual-
istic) interpretation
1
of our common moral life,
to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons
as the truth (or the reality) of the universe,
rather than in an interpretation of the universe
as the thinking experience of a single absolute
1
See p. 160. »
See p. 200 et. ff. »
See p. 64.
*
For a statement upon the philosophy of religion in France
later
see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi.
p. 304), by Le Roy. This
whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical
and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have in-
dicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the " Will-to-
"
Believe philosophy have been received in France, and the different
issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look
at a constructive, philosophical view (by the
doyen of French philosophy
36 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
We shall meantime take leave of French
Pragmatism
1
with the reflection that it is thus
obviously as complex and as confusing and con-
fused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other
countries. It is now almost a generation since
" "
professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or voluntarist
" "
point of view in religion and the older intellectual view, cannot do
better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy,
by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at
present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the
following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Bou-
troux exposes the error of " the radical distinction between theory and
practice." "The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an
element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We
cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is
'
at his disposal. That would be something like offering a printed bill
of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.' Man uses science but he lives
religion. The part cannot replace the whole the symbol cannot
;
" Not
suppress reality." .
only is science unable to replace religion,
. .
but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter
is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective
and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience.
Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given
which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which
"
science imagines for her own convenience (p. 329).
1
Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr.
Schiller's review in Mind, July 191 1) the acquaintance of the important
work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central
" "
conception of this work, that action is all-including and that all
knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much
that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also
in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of
M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of
M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist
philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at
the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of
"
Pragmatism as to some extent scepticism and irrationalism." I am
inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has
some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing
with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory.
Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production
as Blondel's book upon Action.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 37
1
we began to hear of a renascence of spiritualism
and idealism in France in connexion not merely
with the work of philosophers like Renouvier and
Lachelier and Fouillee and Boutroux, but with
2
notre se confond activement des quelle mtrite le nom de volontt libre, etc."
In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense
of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.
38 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
And as for the special question of the influence
of James and his philosophy upon Bergson, and
of that of the possible return influence of Bergson
1
upon James, the evidence produced by Lalande
from Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect
that both men have worked very largely in-
dependently of each other, although perfectly
cognisant now and then of each other's publica-
tions. Both men, along with their followers
(and this is all that needs interest us), have
obviously been under the influence of ideas that
have long been in the air about the need of a philo-
sophy that is "more truly empirical" than the
2
1
See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of James
which this interesting special subject is discussed as
(Paris, 191 1), in
well as the important difference between James and Bergson.
2
Rey in his Philosophic Moderne, 1908, speaks of the "gleaning of
" " "
the practical factors of rationalistic systems as the new line in
French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226).
3 From
the Lalande article already mentioned.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 39
n '
1
spirit before obtaining
recognition. official
This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last
conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths
of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very
appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor)
must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have
long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in
German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with
those who treat Kant's ethical philosophy of postulates as the real
Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching
" " " "
philosophy of the hypotheses and the fictions that we must
use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who
reviews this work in Mind (19 12), I am inclined to think that it
travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical concep-
tion of knowledge, out - pragmatising the pragmatists apparently.
The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of
information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have prag-
matist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the
German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are
mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw
Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of
abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and
edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.
Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the Archiv
3
ftir Philosophic, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as
one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social
Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic
book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale
Frage im Lichte der Philosophic, 1903). His tendency here is realistic
and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher)
far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald.
40 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
see save in the broad light of
Pragmatism
" "
the humanism that has always characterised
philosophy, when properly appreciated, and under-
stood in the light of its true genesis. Pragma-
tism has in fact been long known in Germany
" "
under the older names of Voluntarism and
"
Humanism," although it may doubtless be
associated there with some of the more pro-
nounced tendencies such as the recent
of the hour,
" "
insistence of the Gottingen Fries School upon
" "
the importance of the genetic and the " descrip-
' '
Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into
Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject,
and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it
in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv.
1
Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study)
the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the
" "
tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form hypotheses
" "
or conceptions, that are to them the best means of describing or
" "
explaining (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between
facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in
" " "
Vienna) is a phenomenalist and " methodologist who attacks all
" "
a priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the material of
"
a science under the idea of the most economic expenditure " of our
"
mental energy." One of the best known of his books is his Analysis of
the Sensations (translated, along with his Popular Science Lectures, in the
" "
Open Court Library of Chicago). In this work he carries out the
idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of
" " " "
facts to symbols." Thing, body, matter," he says (p. 6),
" "
are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes." Man possesses
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 41
" " " "
empiricism and realism of thinkers like
the late Dr. Avenarius 1 of Zurich.
in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining
his point of view." In his Introduction, he attempts to show how
" " " "
the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise to problems
" " "
in the relations simply of certain complexes of sensation to each
other." While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees
" "
the subjective," or the mental," factor in facts and things and objects,
it must be said that he ignores altogether the
philosophical problems of
"
the ego, or the self," as something more than a mere object among
objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of " Energetics,"
the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philo-
sophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and
motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of
the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of
energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these
may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in
our interpretation of the physical world. Our " consciousness would
thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy
of the nerves." The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism,
and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of
Herbert Spencer) to explain the " forms," or the categories, of experience
" " " "
as simply norms or rules that have been handed on from one
generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate
philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy.
His Natural Philosophy has recently been translated into English
(Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking
" "
upon concepts and classification as not questions of the so-called
" " "
essence of the thing, but rather as pertaining to purely practical
arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific
problems" (p. 67). He
also takes a pragmatist, or "functional,"
conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor
Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures
were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Pro-
fessor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his
theory in philosophical bearings in the Philosophical Review, vol. xii.
its
1
The philosophy
of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor
of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called "
Empirical Criticism,"
which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude
to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary
account of Avenarius in Mind for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich.
Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to
the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the
social environment out of which they come.
42 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
"
Then the so-called teleological," or "prac-
tical," character of human thinking has
our
also been recognized in modern German thought
long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even
by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and
Sigwart. The work
the latter thinker upon
of
" "
close association between the metaphysical
and the "cultural" in books like those of Jerusalem 1
and Eleutheropulos 2 (3) the sharp criticism of
;
his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately
described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and
of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the
"
"
descriptive
"
and the " normative sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics,
and so on).
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 47
Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon
Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English
and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous
book upon Plato's Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt
to connect Plato's "Ideas" with the modern notion of the law of a
phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important develop-
ment of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the
Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works
exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and
Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism
and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether any-
thing as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr.
1 See the instructive
"
Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon Recent Tendencies in
American Philosophy." The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
3
See p. 180.
4
Without pretending to anything like a representative or an ex-
haustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention
the following : Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles
"
for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv.,
upon A
Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization," and a
Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge " ; Professor
"
Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the Evolution of
"
Pragmatism and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the
;
'
Thirteen Pragmatisms." These are but a few out of the many that
might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more
such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and
Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years
after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German
Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of
Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophic,
4
50 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy
of James and the California address, and in con-
nexion (according to the generous testimony of
"
James) with Deweyism or Instrumentalism."
Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine
"
discussion of ideas as instruments of thought,"
" " "
and of the consequences (" theoretical or
" "
practical or what not) by which ideas were to
"
be tested," was pronounced by James, in 1906,
to be largely crude and superficial. It had the
indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two
valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies
in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds
of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there
seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as
"
a theory of knowledge," and asa" philosophical
generalization." The upshot of the whole pre-
liminary discussion was (1) the discovery that,
Pragmatism having himself put
arisen (as Dewey
it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies
" '
in regard to what we might call the approach
"
to philosophy, would probably soon dissolve
"
itself back again into some of the streams out
of which it had 1
and
the discovery that
arisen, (2)
"
"
all that this early methodological pragmatism
amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the
*
Professor Pratt, What is Pragmatism ? (Macmillan & Co., 1909) ;
criticisms x
that have been made there for at least
two generations on the more or less formal and
abstract character of the
metaphysic our of
Neo-Kantians and our Neo-Hegelians (2) the ;
"
upon the reality of activity and " purpose in
mental process, and upon the part played by
them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and
of our adjustment to the world in which we find
ourselves. And (4) the ethical and social ideal -
1
The criticisms of which I am thinking are (to select but a few from
" "
Jowett's complaint (in the life by Campbell) that the Oxford
Hegelianism of his day was teaching students to place an undue reliance
upon "words" and "concepts" in the place of facts and things
•
"
Dr. Bosanquet's admission (many years ago) that, "
of course, gods
"
and men" were more than bloodless categories ;
Professor Pringle
Pattison's criticism of Hegel in his Hegelianism and Personality ;
the Hegelian conception of truth is set forth along with that of other views.
4 In
Idealism as a Practical Creed, in his Browning as a Religious and
Philosophical Teacher, and elsewhere.
THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT 57
2 3
Boyce-Gibson, Henry H. Sturt, S. H.
1
Taylor,
5
Mellone, J. H. B. Joseph, and others, and even,
4
of it)
God's supposed absolute
of reconciling
knowledge of reality with our finite and limited
2
apprehension of the same.
The main interest, however, of pragmatists in
their somewhat tiresome insistence upon the
truism that all truth is made
their hostility truth is
authority cannot rule us, nor His knowledge know us, or any human
thing just as our authority does not extend to the gods, nor our know-
;
"
gods, are not our masters, neither do they know the things of men
(Parmenides, 134, Jowett's Plato, vol. iv.).
is, of course, a very old difficulty, involved in the problem
2 This
in the fact, forexample, that Mr. Bertrana Russell begins his recent
booklet upon The Problems of Philosophy with the following inquiry
"
about knowledge Is there any knowledge in the world which is so
:
"
certain that no reasonable man could doubt it ? I mean that the
conveys the impression that the supreme reality for philosophy is still
some independently certain piece of knowledge. I prefer, with the
pragmatists and the humanists, to think of knowledge as concerned
with the purposes of persons as intelligent beings, or with the realities
revealed in the knowing process. Although there are passages in his
book that show Mr. Russell to be aware of the selves and the psychical
elements and processes that enter into knowing, they do not affect his
62 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" that
dishonesty, that insincerity, characteristic
of philosophical discussion, that is manifested in
can exist, or can possibly begin, without some direct contact with
reality, without the experience of some person or persons, without
assumptions of one kind or another.
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 63
indicate in the text above, that this dualism is ultimate. It has come
about only from an unfortunate setting of some parts of our nature,
or of our experience in opposition to the whole of our nature, or the
5
66 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
more than they know, the chief difficulty
about this fact being that there is no recognized
way of expressing it in our science or in
our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our
behaviour in society. It is, however, only the
undue prominence of mathematical and physical
science since the time of Descartes 1 that has
made evidence and demonstration the main
consideration philosophy instead of belief,
of
man's true and fundamental estimate of reality.
We have already 2 pointed out that one of the
main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on
the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental
it here with three references to its existence taken from the words or
the work of living writers. The first shall be the opposition which Mr.
Bertrand Russell finds in his Philosophical Essays (in the " Free Man's
" "
Worship ") between the world which science presents for our belief
"
and the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day." The second shall
be the inconsistency that exists in Mr. Hugh S. R. Elliot's book upon
Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, between his initial
acceptance of the mechanical, evolutionary system of modern science
"
and his closing acceptance of feeling and poetry and love as the deepest
forms of happiness." The third shall be the declaration of Professor
"
Sir Henry Jones of Glasgow (in the Hibbert Journal, 1903) that one
of the characteristics of our time is the contradiction that exists between
its practical faith in morality and its theoretical distrust of the con-
work,'
etc., suggests to the typical intellectualist mind a sort of coarse, lame,
second-rate makeshift article of truth " (James, Pragmatism, pp. 66-
67; italics mine). The words about Rationalism being comfortable
only in the world of abstractions are substantiated by the procedure of
Bosanquet, to whom I refer in Chapter VIII., or by the procedure of
Mr. Bertrand Russell, referred to on p. 169.
70 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
of experience upon this truly important and
inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed
can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence
upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflec-
tions and criticisms to which they naturally give
rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic
of Pragmatism.
Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed
with the power of reflection, not so much to enable
him to understand the world either as a whole or
in its detailed workings as to assist him in the
further evolution of his life. His beliefs and
choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were,
forces and influences in this direction. Indeed,
it always the soul or the life principle that is
is
biologist, God
to the theologian, progress to the
philanthropist, and so on.
Further, mankind in general is not likely to
abandon its habit of estimating all systems of
thought and philosophy from the point of view
of their value as keys, or aids, to the
problem
of the meaning and the development of life as a
" " " "
whole. There is no abstract truth or good
" "
or beauty apart from the lives of beings who
contemplate, and who seek to create, such
things as truth and goodness and beauty.
To understand knowledge and intellect, again,
we must indeed look at them in their actual
development in connexion with the total vital
or personal activity either of the average or even
of the exceptional individual. And instead of
regarding the affections and the emotions as
inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior
to it, we ought to remember that they rest in
general upon a broader and deeper attitude to
72 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
1
See p. 4 and p. 237.
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 75
" " "
that truth is an hypothesis," and that
"
except as a means to a foreign end it is useless
"
and impossible and " when we judge truth by
;
"
1
From Truth and Copying," Mind, No. 62.
" '*
a From Truth and Practice," in Mind. Cf. This denial of tran-
scendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas
as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself
" "
most welcome (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, Ambiguity of
Pragmatism "). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such
concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of
independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his
own experience of " metaphysics," and of other things besides, that
many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing
whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could
in
certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy
England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley's
development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete
sense (who ever was ?), and he has now certainly abandoned an
abstract, formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical
of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which
"
Pragmatism stands, we may append the following I long ago pointed :
out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main
contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. // Pragmatism
"
means this, I am a pragmatist (from an article in Mind on the
"
Ambiguity of Pragmatism" italics mine). — "
We may reject the limita-
tion of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may
deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation.
Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our
nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly
satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satis-
faction. This is a doctrine which, to mind, commends itself as
my "
true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation
(from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final
76 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
"
truth and practice that absolute certainty is
;
"
not requisite for working purposes that it is a ;
1
"superstition to think that the intellect is the
highest part of us," and that it is well to attack
"
a one-sided " intellectualism ; that both
"
in-
" " " "
tellectualism and voluntarism are one-
sided," and that he has no " objection to identify-
ing reality with goodness or satisfaction, so long as
this does not mean merely practical satisfaction." 2
Then from this same author comes the following
familiar statement about philosophy as a whole :
"
Philosophy always will be hard, and what it
promises in the end is no clear vision nor any
complete understanding or vision, but its certain
reward is a continual and a heightened appreciation
[this is the result of science as well as of philosophy]
of the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its
3
complexities and all its unity and all its worth."
Equally equally important is
typical and
the following concession from Professor Taylor,
vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in sub-
stance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are
so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really
one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer
and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits
of "
any personal individualism (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr.
Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on
the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35.
1
the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a
Cf.
"
belief in the unqualified
supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of
philosophers."
2
See p. 147.
"
3
Truth and Practice," Mind, No. 51.
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS y7
1
Sec the well-known volume Personal Idealism, edited by Mr. Sturt.
80 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn
may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an
undue emphasis 1 upon volition and action and
upon merely practical truth.
We shall now terminatethe foregoing char-
acterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two
or three other specific things for which it may,
with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in
philosophy. These are (i) the repudiation of
the "correspondence view" 2 of the relation of
147 and 193.
1
Cf. pp.
2
notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all
By this
" "
cases corresponds to fact, my perception of the sunset to the
" " " "
real sunset, my idea of a true friend to a real person whose
" " " "
outward acts correspond to or faithfully reflect his inner feelings.
See the first chapter of Mr. Joachim's book upon The Nature of Truth,
where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably
the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into philo-
sophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by
nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists, who
first began to teach that truth is what it
"
appears to be
" —the
"
rela-
"
tivity position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said that
"
When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call this
truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is
always the same." The common-sense view was held also by St.
"
Augustine in the words, That is true what is really what it seems to
be (verum est quod ita est, ut videtur)," by Thomas Aquinas as the
"
adequacy of the intellect to the thing," in so far as the intellect says
that that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (adaequatio
intellectus et rei),by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity of
the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to appear,
say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the subject
and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in Locke,
who says " Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the word
:
' '
with the outer world means that its effort successfully meets the
environment in behalf of the organic interest from which it sprang.
The mind, like an antenna, feels the way for the organism. It gropes
about, advances and recoils, making many random efforts and many
failures but it is always urged into taking the initiative by the pressure
;
" "
the lectures embodied in Pragmatism (New York, 1908) ..." the
concreteness and closeness to facts of pragmatism may be what
. . .
and that its chief method is the interpretation of the same experience —
an easy thing, doubtless, to profess, but somewhat difficult to carry out.
1
Principles of Pragmatism, Houghton Mifflin, 1910, pp. 44-45.
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 87
"
thinks," or thinking is going on," or about the
" "
being of the individual person as consisting
" "
simply in a doing." All this we hold," says
93
94 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
truth or of nature
theof reality (the reality
" "
of the physical world) as if either (or each)
of thesethings were an entity on its own
account, an absolutely final finding or considera-
tion. That this has really been the case so far
as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact
even of the existence of the many characteristic
deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in
respect of Pragmatism to which reference has
already been made in the preceding chapter.
And that it has also been the case so far as
science is concerned
proved by the existence
is
quite agree with Maeterlinck, and with Bergson and others, that the
soul is to some extent limited by the demands of action and speech,
and by the duties and the conventions of social life, but I still believe
in the action test for contemplations and thoughts and beliefs and ideas,
however lofty. It is only the thoughts that we can act out, that we can
consciously act upon in our present human life, and that we can persuade
others to act upon, that are valuable to ourselves and to humanity. It
is to their discredit that so many men and so many thinkers entertain,
and give expression to, views about the universe which renders their
activities as agents and as thinkers and as seekers quite inexplicable.
PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 95
1
reality of everything else under heaven, and of
everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent
confessions of their own colleagues with regard to
the actual and the necessary limits and limitations
of science and of the scientific outlook.
on, that the idealists are doing their share with the pragmatists in
breaking it up. In America there is no practical distinction between
culture and work. See my chapter on Pragmatism as Americanism.
8
The importance of this consideration about the " attention " that
"
is (as a matter of fact and a matter of necessity) involved in all
percep-
tion," cannot possibly be exaggerated. We perceive in childhood and
throughout life in the main what interests us, and what affects our total
and organic activity. It is, that is to say, our motor activity, and its
direction, that determine what we see and perceive and experience.
And in the higher reaches of our life, on the levels of art and religion
and philosophy, this determining power becomes what we call our
96 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
reason and our will and our selective attention. Perception, in other
words, is a kind of selective activity, involving what we call impulse
and effort and will. Modern philosophy has forgotten this in its
treatment of our supposed perception of the world, taking this to
be something given instead of something that is constructed by our
activity. Hence its long struggle to overcome both the apparent
materialism of the world of the senses, and the gap, or hiatus, that
has been created by Rationalism between the world as we think it, and
the world as it really is.
1
E.g. Professor Bosanquet, in his 1908 inaugural lecture at St.
"
Andrews upon The Practical Value of Moral Philosophy. Theory
"
does indeed belong to Practice. It is a form of conation (p. 9). It
"
should no doubt be understood as Theoria, or the entire unimpeded life
of the soul" (p. 11 ;italics mine).
PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY 97
chapter.
7
98 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the
"
from the stage of a mere " instrumentalist view
of human thought to that of an outspoken
1 ' ' '
humanism or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The
fact of seeking to leave us (as the outcome
its
our human
personality that, in the moral life, and
in such things as religious aspiration and creative
effort and transcends the merely
social service,
theoretical descriptions of the world with which
we are familiar in the generalizations of science
and of history.
Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all
protozoons do we find
'
of typical activities that
imply
2
volition of some sort or degree, for there
appears to be some selection of food and some
spontaneity of movement changes of direction,
:
and implicit) of all biologists and evolutionists. Human life they all
seem to regard as a kind of continuity or development of the life of
universal nature, whether their theory of the origin of life be that of
cosmozoa " (germs capable of
" "
(1) spontaneous generation," (2)
"
life scattered throughout space), (3) Preyer's theory of the continuity
"
of life," (4)Pfliiger's theory of the chemical characteristics of proteid,"
"
or the conclusion of Vervvorn himself,
(5) that existing organisms are
derived in uninterrupted descent from the first living substance that
originated from lifeless substance" (General Physiology, p. 315).
104 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
verse in general. And then, secondly, there is the
familiar reflection that nearly all that we think
we know about the universe as a whole is but an
interpretation of it in terms of the life and the
energy that we experience in ourselves and in
terms of some of the apparent conditions of this
lifeand this energy. For as Bergson reminds
"
us, As thinking beings we may apply the laws
of our physics to our world, and extend them to
each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing
tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor
On
the ground, then, both of science and of
2
philosophy may it be definitely said that this
human action of ours, as apparently the highest
outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too
1
Creative Evolution, pp. 245-5.
It is, I think, an important reflection that it is precisely in this very
2
" "
reality of action that science and philosophy come together. That
all the sciences meet in the concept, or the fact, of action is, of
course, quite evident from the new knowledge of the new physics.
Professor M'Dougall has recently brought psychology into line with
the natural sciences by defining its subject-matter as the actions
" "
or the behaviour of human beings and animals. And it is surely
not difficult to see —
that —
as I try to indicate it is in human behaviour
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV
I. It requires no
very profound acquaintance with the trend
of the literature of general and specialized
philosophy of the last
twenty-five years to detect a decidedly practical turn in the
recent speculative tendencies of philosophy and philosophers.
The older conception of philosophy or metaphysics as an attempt
to state (more or less systematically) the value of the world for
thought is being slowly modified, if not
altogether disappearing,
into the attempt to explain or to grasp the significance of the
world from the stand-point of the moral and social activity of
man. The philosophical student must be to some extent conscious
of the difference in respect of both tone and
subject-matter
between such books as Stirling's Secret of Hegel, E. Caird's Critical
Philosophy of Kant (the first editions of both works), Green's
Prolegomena to Ethics, and the most recent essays and books of
Professors A. Seth x and James 2 and Ward 3 and Sidgwick 4 and
1
Alan's Place in the Cosmos, a book consisting of essays and re-
views published by the author during the last four or five years.
" They
all advocate humanism in opposition to naturalism," or " ethicism in
opposition to a too narrow intellectualism."
2
The Will to Believe, 1897.
* "
Progress in Philosophy," art. Mind, 15, p. 213.
*
Practical Ethics
; Essays.
no PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
Baldwin, 1 and of Mr. Bosanquet 2 and the late Mr. Nettleship, 3
— —
and between to turn to Germany the writings of Erdmann and
Kuno Fischer and Zeller and F. A. Lange, and those of Gizycki,
Paulsen, Windelband, Eucken, Hartmann, Deussen, Simmel, and
— in France —between the writings of Renouvier and Pillon and
" "
Ravaisson, the Neo-Kantianism of the Critique Philosophique
(1872 -1877), and those of Fouillee, Weber (of Strassburg),
Seailles, Dunan, and others, and of general writers like de Vogue,
Desjardins, and Brunetiere, and of social philosophers like Bougie,
Tarde, Izoulet, and so on. The change of venue in these writers
alone, not to speak of the change of the interest of the educated
world from such books as Huxley's Hume and Renan's L'Avenir
de la Science and Du Bois Reymond's Die Sieben Weltrdthsel, and
Tyndall's Belfast Address, to the writings of Herbert Spencer (the
Sociology and the general essays on social evolution), Kidd,
Nordau, Nietzsche, Mr. Crozier (his important History of Civiliza-
tion), and Demolins, and the predominance of investigations into
4
8
1 14 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" "
HeLmholtz and Du Bois Reymond, that positive philosophers
like Riehl and Laas and Feuerbach and others have, through the
influence of the Kantian philosophy, learned and accepted the
" " " "
fact of there being ideal or psychical or mind-supplied
factors in so-called external reality. There are among the
educated men of to-day very few Dr. Johnsons who ridicule the
psycho-physical, or the metaphysical, analysis of external reality,
" "
who believe in a crass and crude and self-sufficient matter
utterly devoid of psychical attributes or characteristics. True,
"
Herbert Spencer has written words to the effect that If the
Idealist (Berkeley) is right, then the doctrine of Evolution is
"
a dream but then everything in Spencer's philosophy about
;
" "
an actuality lying behind appearances and about our being
"
compelled to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of
some Power by which we are acted upon," is against the possi-
bility of our believing that, according to that philosophy, an
" "
unconscious and non-spiritual matter could evolve itself into
conscious life and moral experience. The philosophers of to-day
have indeed rejoiced to see Kant's lesson popularized by such
various phases and movements of human thought as psycho-
physical research, art and aesthetic theory, the interest in
Buddhism (with its idealistic theory of the knowledge of the
senses), and the speculative biology of Weismann and others.
That people generally should see that matter is, for many reasons,
something more than mere matter, is to the student of Kant a
piece of fulfilled prophecy. And by a plea for a return to reality
and life and sociability from conceptualism and criticism and
speculative individualism no philosophical scholar for one moment
contemplates, as even conceivable, an overlooking of the idealistic
interpretation of the data of the senses supplied by Locke and
Berkeley and Hume, or of the idealistic interpretation
"
of the data
"
of science and understanding supplied by Kant's Copernican
discovery. Any real view of the universe must now presuppose
the melting down of crass external reality into the phenomena of
sense and experience and the transformation of inorganic and
organic nature into so many planes or grades of being expressive
of the different forms (gravitation, cohesion, vital force, psychic
force) in which cosmic energy manifests itself.
Equally little does the Newer Idealism
"
question the legitimacy
"
or the actual positive service of the dialectic of Hegel (as
" "
Archimedean a leverage to humanity as was the concept of
" "
Socrates or the apperception of Kant) that has shown the
world to be a system in which everything is related to everything
else, and shown, too, that all ways of looking at reality that stop
APPENDIX 115
1
I think that I must here have meant Professor Watson's
Christianity and Idealism.
CHAPTER V
CRITICAL
And apart from the idealism and the ethical philosophy of which
1
that the very first thing about Pragmatism is its desire to return to a
practical conception of life, although a tendency in this direction doubt-
less exists in it.
i.
465).
CRITICAL 121
superstition of philosophers ;
or the idea of Plato
in the Sophist 4 that reality is the capacity for acting
or of being acted upon and so on. ;
As
for such further confirmation of pragmatist
recognizing its origins and its resources, its present limitations and its
"
need of fresh light from other minds, from different social moulds
(pp. 215-216).
8
See p. 81.
CRITICAL 123
true that the sanity and happiness of all the world lies in its habits of
generalization."
1 I
cannot meantime trace, or place, this quotation, although I
1
Sec the reference in Chapter II. p. 26 to the opportunistic ethic
of Prezzolini. a
In What is Pragmatism? Macmillan & Co.
128 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
reason that the proof of truth is not in the first
"
instance any kind of consequences," not even
" "
the verification of which pragmatists are so
fond. If the truth of which we may happen to
"
be thinking is truth of fact," its proof lies in its
1
correspondence (despite the difficulties of the idea)
with the results of observation or perception. 2
And be inferential truth, its proof is that of
if it
inability
2
to prove its own —
philosophy that is,
1
Bourdeau makes the same charge, saying that all pragmatists
have the illusion that " reality is unstable." Professor Stout has
"
something similar in view in referring to Dr. Schiller's primary
"
reality in the Mind review of Studies in Humanism. It is only the
reality with which we have to do (reality vpbs was as an Aristotelian
134 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" "
might say) that is in the making for God there can be no such
:
1
The same line of reflection will be found in James's Pragmatism,
p. 96.
CRITICAL 137
is too
those of the Absolute. (3) The ethical ideal of Absolutism
" "
static." (4) Absolutism does not provide any material for new
goals and new ideals." See pp. 218-225 in my eighth chapter, where I
censure, in the interest of Pragmatism and Humanism, the ethical
endeavouring to become.
the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick
Utilitarianism that it is
expressly states it as a grave argument against
no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral
by
distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral
value.
prescriptions have merely a utilitarian
CHAPTER VI
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM
experience of it.
1
To the biologist, as we put it
in our fourth chapter, reality is life to the ;
physicist it is energy ;
to the theologian it is
"
to the lover of truth it is a
partly intelligible
system." The only rational basis, however, for
all constructive interpretation of reality is
this
the familiar idealist position of the necessary
" " "
implication of the subject in the object,"
" " " "
the fact that things or existences are
invariably thought of as the elements or com-
ponent parts in some working system or sphere
of reality that is contemplated by some being
or beings in reference to some purpose or end.
On so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is
its
"
What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I
repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense."
144 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
the susceptibility of everything to the influence of
everything else is no less certainly assumed than in
the case of the world of life itself. But, as the
idealist realizes in a moment, there is
possibility no
of separating, either in thought or experimentally,
this supposed physical world from the so-called
The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral
consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter,
"
Hobhouse talks of things like the purity of the home, truthfulness,
10
146 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
"
for example, of facts like the gradual blunting
of the edges of barbarian ideas," and the recognition
" "
of the principal moral obligations in the early
oriental civilizations, the existence of the "doctrine
"
of forgiveness," and of disinterested retributive
kindly emotion," the acceptance and redistribution
by Confucius of the traditional standards of
" "
Chinese ethics, the transformation by the
"
Hebrew prophets of law of a barbarous
the
people into the spiritual worship of one God," of
" "
a God of social justice," of mercy," and finally
"
of love." Both these writers, in view of such
facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive
at the conclusion that the supreme authority
assigned to the moral law is not altogether an
"
illusion, that there is after all the great permanent
fact of the moral consciousness persisting through
all stages of development, that whether we believe
personality. We
seek truth in the first instance
because we wish to act upon certainty or upon
adequate certainty, and because we feel that we
must be determined by what appeals to our own
convictions and motives, by what has become part
of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact
because we will it, and because we want it, that the
"
ideal
"
exists —the ideal of anything, more certain
ifthe rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it
isbetter to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is
"
reminded by realism of the splendid immoralism " of Nature, of its
apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I
have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical
" "
science speaks is an abstraction and an unreality, and that it
matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not,
indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from
life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God,
and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 149
recent times.
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 151
1
The Poetry of the Old Testament, Professor A. R. Gordon.
2
Ibid. p. 4.
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 153
"
our western world to take care of itself. The
Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of 6 KaXbs
'
1
It is this false conception of truth as a
"
datum " or " content "
that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley's argument in Appearance and
Reality. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor
Boyce Gibson (Eucken's Philosophy of Life, p. 109) in respect of the
attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal.
"
The ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinct-
ness of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to
it,nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness
as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized as
springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which
our freedom gains from its dependence upon God."
2
It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to
include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of philo-
sophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not allowing
for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world through
the insight of individuals and through the actions and the creations of
original men.
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 155
"
and 17-30) puts it that in the case of immaterial existences the
—
desirable and the intelligible are the same in primis vero principiis
materiae non immixtis idem est desiderabile atque intelligibile." I
a comprehension of things.
2
The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin's Social and
Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development
upon the relation of
truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the pragmatist
or the experimental test of beliefs.
3
See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson's " creative
activity."
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 157
there being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of
specialization and discursiveness
and " technic." It is quite difficult
to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, every-
thing, from even some single point of view.
And then the wide accept-
ance of the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge
has caused us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and
knowledge as a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned
by, certain points of view and certain assumptions. We are not
even warranted, for example, in thinking of mind and matter as
separate in the old way, nor can we separate the
life of the individual
from the life of the race, nor the world from God, nor man from
God, and so on. See an article by the writer (in 1898 in the Psy. Rev.)
"
upon Professor Titchener's View of the Self," dealing with the actual,
and the necessary limits, of the point of view of Structural Psychology
"
in regard to the self." Also Professor Titchener's reply to this article in
a subsequent number of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
158 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
tions of our knowledge of our environment to
justify the
correctness of the pragmatist in-
sistence upon the ethical and the personal factors
that enter into truth. Reference having already
been made to these limits, there is perhaps little
need of pursuing this topic
any further, either
so far as the facts themselves are concerned or
so far as their admission and others
by scientists
is concerned. How
any supposed mere physical
order can ever come to know itself as such, either
in the minds of men or in the minds of beings
other than men, is of course the crowning diffi-
1
See Chapter II. p. 35.
"
Despite what we spoke of
2
in Chapter V. as its subjectivism," p. 134.
160 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
matism for its inability to recognize the elemental
truth 1 in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit
of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much
"
modern philosophy, take its start with the con-
"
tents of the consciousness of the individual
as the one indubitable beginning, the one incon-
cussum quid for all speculation. This starting-
point has often, as we know, been taken (even by
students of philosophy) to be the very essence
of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there
" ' "
is indeed no object without a subject,"
" " "
no matter without mind," neither mind
nor matter is limited to my experience of the
same. 2 It is impossible for me to interpret, or
even to express, to myself the contents of my
experience without using the terms and the con-
ceptions that have been invented by minds and
by personalities other than my own without whom
Icould not, and do not, grow up into what I call
"
my self-consciousness." 3 We have all talked
" "
1
That is to say, the simple truth that there is no object without
" " " "
a subject," no physical world without a world of " psychical
experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth
existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part
" "
of some other system which we must think of as the object of some
mind or intelligence.
2
See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested
that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.
3
Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett's admirable
Anthropology (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive
of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying
philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and
moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the
clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the
" "
importance of the social factor over all our thoughts of ourselves
as agents and students in the universe of things." Payne shows us
PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM 161
(p. 146) reason for believing that the collective we precedes I in the
order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere,
'
we may be inclusive and mean all of us,' or selective, meaning some
' ' '
' '
included in the list of sinners. Similarly I has a collective form
amongst some American languages ;
and this is ordinarily employed,
whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.
Thus, if the question be Who will help ? the Apache will reply, I-
' ' '
' '
'
11
162 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
committed to Pluralism, 1 nor am I, of course, blind
to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against
Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But
I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as
"
it is in the main (at least as an " approach to
philosophy), it follows that the reality with
which we are in contact in all our thoughts and
"
in all our theorizing is not any or all of the con-
"
tents of the consciousness of the individual
thinker, but rather the common, personal life of
isthat it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which
the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way.
In opposition to " subjectivism " it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism
that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our
common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it
PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM
survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expres-
sion of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generation.
—
In all the higher things of the mind in religion, literature, in the moral
emotions, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that
Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the
times." —
" The
Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," in Winds of
Doctrine (p. 187).
2
A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in his
book upon The American Mind naturally singles out radicalism as
one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the other
"
characteristics of which he speaks are those of the love of exaggera-
172 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
(that is to say, its endless faith in
experience),
its democratic character, and its insistence
upon the necessity to philosophy of a broad,
tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature. So,
too, are its insistence
upon the basal character
of belief, and upon the importance of a creed
1
" "
or a philosophy that really works in the lives
of intelligent men, its feeling of the
inadequacy
of a merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy,
and even its quasi "practical' interpretation of
itself inthe realms of philosophy and religion and
ethics —
"
its confession of itself as a corridor-
theory," as a point of approach to all the
different systems in the history of thought. In
addition to these characteristics we shall attempt
now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly,
of some of the characteristics of American uni-
versity life of which Pragmatism
may perhaps
be regarded as a partial expression or reflex,
and then after this, of such broadly -marked
and such well-known American characteristics
as the love of the concrete (in preference to
the abstract), the love of experiment and ex-
"
tion," idealism," "optimism," "individualism," "public spirit." 1
"
truth known as ? What is philosophy known
'
" "
as? What are the different thought-levels ' '
1
the body of fact and tendency upon which it
It is this fact, or
rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe them, to
" " "
think and speak of the apparently purely economic or business-
"
like character of the greater part of their activities. Let me quote
Professor Bliss Perry here ..." the overwhelming preponderance of
the unmitigated business-man face [italics mine], the consummate mono-
" "
tonous commonness of the pushing male crowd (p. 158). There
exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as
' '
there existed during the Revolution, during the transcendental
movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualised,
"
unvitalised American manhood and womanhood (p. 160).
3
And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative
failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of
" "
personality and of the " self."
180 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
to philosophy and to the thought and practice of
the world (the two things are inseparable) of some
or all of these general and special characteristics
which we have sought to illustrate in Prag-
matism.
We
might begin by suggesting the importance
to the world of the production and development
of a man of genius like James, 1 whose fresh and
work, along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers
" "
(and along with the lead that America now certainly has over at
least England in some departments of study, like political and economic
science, experimental psychology, and
so on), are part of the debt
America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of
—
the training of many of her best professors a debt she has long since
cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more
authentic information about James and his work than the present
writer is either capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may
consistency.
Then might be held that the entire
again, it
the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers in the
light of the world's concrete fulness that I have never been able to
forget it."
—From an article upon James in the Journal of Philosophy ,
ix. p. 527.
1
While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon
the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very person-
"
ality of James : It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of
Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else.
Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He
had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with
the moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling
represents the true America, and represented in a measure the whole
"
ultra-modern radical world {Winds of Doctrine, p. 205).
182 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
tion and research in an environment replete with
all modern facilities and conveniences. 1 The very
existence of this environment along with the
cated estimate of the work that has been done in different countries
upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit and the
possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again
and again
its system and its facilities simply stagger the European] is a thing
of the greatest value to the American professor so far as the idea of his
own best possible contribution to his age is concerned. Should he
merely do over again what others have done ? Or shall he try to work
in a really new field ? Or shall he give himself to the work of real
" "
teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the organization
of his subject with his public ? It must be admitted, I think, that the
touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. " But if this
is to be successful,
training philosophy must be presented, not as a
complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as a
system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary
thinking and our everyday conduct."
1
See p. 136.
PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM 189
the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for the cure
of evils ;
the American sensitiveness to pain and their hesitation
(4)
about the punishment, etc. Nor do I forget
infliction of suffering or
the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and modern inven-
tions in countries other than America. I simply mean that owing to
1 On
what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of " compensating
"
justice as a naive idea ? It is on the contrary one of the highest and
deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind
has ever attained— giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies
and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of
the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rational-
ism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
2
Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and
such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all ?
3 I do not think
that this is a fair preliminary description of the
problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of
purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be ac-
quainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds,
but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes.
And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves
who also realize purposes.
198 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
"
that his subject-matter throughout will be the
' '
purposes or
things desires
appreciating in
the work of factors in the universe, or of the
universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self-
"
experiencing whole ? The answer is spread
over several chapters, and is practically this, that
" "
although there is undoubtedly a teleology in
"
the universe (in the shape of the conjunctions
and the co-operation of men," or of
results of
"
the harmony of geological and biological evolu-
"
tion "), and although minds such as ours play a
part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of
this work in question in any human manner."
The real test of teleology or value is " wholeness,"
" " "
completeness," individuality [the topic of
1
Italics and exclamation mine.
PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 199
1
Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea
of Professor Bosanquet's, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy
with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as
the only true and real basis for Humanism.
2 Readers who remember Green's
Prolegomena to Ethics will
remember that it is one of the that remarkable, but one-
difficulties of
sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Pro-
fessor Taylor's brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic Problem of Conduct)
" "
that it also seems to teach a kind of Determinism in ethics, in what
our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the
"
Eternal Consciousness." This whole way of looking at things must
largely be abandoned to-day.
200 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
that we mortals value as the greatest of all "goods")
"
is the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!]
" " " "
world, and that the Absolute [the universal
" "
of logic, Plato's Idea "] is the high-water mark
" " "
of our effort," and that each self is more like
a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with
a fixed circumference." The great fact of the
book, the fact upon which its accomplished author
rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief,
"
that in the main the work [of philosophy] has
"
been done," is
daily transmutation of
the
experience according to the level of the mind's
1
See below, p. 226.
It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this contradiction in
2
Dr. Bosanquet's Lectures that will cause the average intelligent person
to turn away from them as not affording an adequate account of the
reality of the world of persons and things with which he knows himself
to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another way of stating the
same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails to take any adequate
"
recognition of that most serious contradiction (or defect ") in our ex-
perience of which we have already spoken as the great dualism of modern
times, the opposition between reason and faith an opposition that
is
" "
tendency to treat the universal as if it were
an entity on its own account with a sort of develop-
ment and " value " and " culmination " of its
own ;
*
(2) his tendency to talk and think as if
" " " "
a characteristic or a predicate (i.e. the
" " " "
characteristic or quality that some ex-
periencing being or some thinker attributes to
reality) could be treated as anything at all apart
" '
" "x
tendency to talk of minds rather than persons,
" " " "
as purposing and desiring things (4) his ;
"
1 Cf. p. 31. We are minds," he says, "i.e. living microcosms, not
with hard and fast but determined by our range and powers
limits,
which fluctuate very greatly." My point simply is that this is too
intellectual! stic a conception of man's personality. We have minds,
but we are not minds.
"
2
See p. 192. But as the self is essentially a world of content en-
"
gaged in certain transformations"; and p. 193, a conscious being
. . .
" "
seems to reflect either a bodily content or
" " 3
some other kind of content that seems to
" "
exist for a spectator of the world, or for the
"
Absolute," rather than for the man himself as an
agent, who of course uses his memories of himself,
" "
or his ideal of himself, for renewed effort and
mind in evolution, 5
giving us in his difficult but
"
important chapter on the relation of mind and
'
" "
contents for itself.
4 It has even
there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely
theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of
" "
attaining to a logical universal." The peculiarity of mind for us,
is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and
completeness." simply not true.
This is
"
6 Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make
its body."
"
6 Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart
cannot represent." (Italics mine.)
208 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" "
and intellectualistic views of the self *
and the
" " " 3
universal 2
and spirit."
There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet's
"
pages of a more " dynamic view of mind or of
4 "
a deeper view than this merely "representational
view, but they are not developed or worked into the
main portion of his argument, which they would
doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly
to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel
seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real
for our human purposes which takes place in the
ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have
"
1 What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a
living world of content representing a certain range of externality."
P. 289.
2 " was
The system of the universe, as said in an earlier Lecture, might
be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality [!]
fives
in the fives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
3 " which can only be by
Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance [!]
' '
contact with a nature an external world."
* "
For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is
thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it
is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its
value and its meaning. The ultimate tendency of thought, we have
. . .
"
seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world," p. 55. Again, the
true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with
meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true
sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living
world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-
determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of
the whole," p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to
and " dispositions "
" " " "
an idealist recognising the use made of laws
in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really
" "
worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental element is
" "
in a sense a disposition to activity !] Some of these statements of
Dr. Bosanquet's have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion
of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) con-
ception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader
with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we
spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).
PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 209
" "
noticed, all purpose is practical and theoretical
at one and the same time.
Then, thirdly, and not " minds,"
it is persons,
" '
14
210 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" 3
tionism and its general injustice to fact due to
1 2
P. 225. gee p. 90.
3
Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case
212 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" "
its initial and persistent conviction x
[strange
to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet]
" "
that the real movement in things is a logical
movement ; (2) itsfallacious conception of the task
of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the
"
world " without contradiction ; (3) its obvious
"
tendency in the direction of the
subjective
"
idealism 2
that has been the bane of so much
modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether 3
by Pragmatism and Humanism (4) its retention ;
" "
of such things as the self and the " universal " and " spirit," it will
"
suffice to point out here in addition (i) its tendency to talk of experi-
"
ence and " experiences " as if there could be such things apart from the
prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with
whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk
" " " "
of getting at the heart of actual life and love in a system which
leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live
and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an
impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on
the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and
think in his book as if his theory of the
" "
concrete universal were
—
practically a new thing in the thought of our time apart altogether,
that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of
other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of
Hegel in the same connexion.
1 See below, p. 230.
2 This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the
logical system of a single complete individual experience a tend- —
ency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism
generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is
1
The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content
with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short
of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative
"
meaning that he attaches to any category of the finite." Also the
well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the
weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view.
In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making
out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious
persons to hold the absurd position of believing in "an impervious
and isolated self," a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything
about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.
2 As another instance of Dr.
Bosanquet's unintentional unfairness
to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such.
What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God
" '
dividualized," to
"
of the whole." 2 We might compare, says Dr.
3
Bosanquet, in a striking and an enthralling
"
passage, the Absolute to Dante's mind as uttered
in the Divine Comedy ... as including in a
single, whole poetic experience a world of space
and persons, . . .
things that, to any ordinary
self of every-day morality and religion," and the marginal heading of the
"
page upon which these words occur is The naive good self compared
to grasp of a fundamental principle alone." Could anything more
clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the
" "
case in point the categories of and the of
goodness categories
"truth"] or what Aristotle calls a fieTapaais eh &\\o yivos, the un-
conscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions
of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that
"
he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and lack
"
of unification of life," and failure of theoretical grasp." This con-
fusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in
"
the words A man is good in so far as his being is unified at all in
:
' '
any sphere of wisdom or activity." [This is simply not true, and its
falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet
than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make
' ' ' ' ' ' '
the moral a kind of unification or effectiveness in purpose ']
absence.
(4) There is really no place either in Dr.
cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than
"
a partial fact." Or the words at the top of this same page : The
primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the
attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one
among other attitudes and spheres of experience." These last words
"
alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of Individu-
ality and Value." The ethical life is to its author only a " quatenus
consider atur," only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality,
"
only an aspect, therefore, of a logical system." Now if the ethical life
of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the
ethical life is no mere aspect and no mere aspect
of the life of the self,
" "
of the life nature in the sense of mere
of the world, seeing that
" "
physical nature does not come into the sphere of morality at all.
" " "
It is rather the activity of the whole self," or the normative
reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or sub-
ordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intel-
lectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.
1
See p. 147, and p. 244.
222 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" "
Bosanquet's concrete universal or in his
fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the
" "
distinction between good and evil (as willed
in actions or as present in dispositions and tend-
encies). Good and evil 1 are for him, " contents "
either for himself as a spectator of man's actions,
" "
or for the concrete universal," or the whole,"
" "
or the completed individual of his too consum-
mate book.
Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegel-
(5)
ianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism)
Dr. Bosanquet's ethics (or the vestigial ethics
with which he leaves us) comes perilously near
to what is known as Determinism 2 or Fatalism or
even Materialism.
1
Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems
"
in active antagonism as claiming to attach different principles and
"
predicates to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr.
Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be
sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the
" "
is an imperfect
" "
evil logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity
which is in " contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving " after
the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical con-
tradiction in the self.
2
This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the " bad will " no
" "
less than the good will is a logical necessity, when taken along with
" "
his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the dependence
(p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world.
Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Deter-
minism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the
" " " "
self as creative and " originative " (p. 354), by the wider
recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the
"
universe
"
as a
"
member " in a " greater self." And he adds in the
"
same sentence the words that I am in a large measure continuous with
the greater (p. 355) self," and
"
dyed with its colours
"— a further step
in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one
to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the
Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his
PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 223
»
By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man's
working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost
—
the best definition that could be given of it our working sense for
reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony
with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling
elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is
also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my
—
opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism that reality
is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experi-
" "
ence. By the retention of the term working in this attempted
definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the
willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding
positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philo-
sophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective
apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable
knowledge or direct evidence and, secondly, that feeling elements and
;
action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp
antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philo-
sophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and know-
ledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking
at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of
faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the
history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think,
that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense
for reality), that is man's measure of reality, our knowledge about the
universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our
beliefs and of their implications —of our sense of the different ways in
which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected
towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that
" "
reality can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which
we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional.
In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse
in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in
a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to
230 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
" '
after all his professional homage to mediation
and to the necessary abstractions of logic and
system, belief and not knowledge that is to him
" "
the final and working estimate of truth and
of reality. And the same conclusion follows from
the second matter of the confession of which we
have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but
the expression of a strong conviction. 1 It is again,
therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction,
and not a conceptual system that is actually
and necessarily the moving force of his entire
intellectual activity. And, we would add to his
"
own face, a conviction moreover that works,"
it is
"
and not a " logical whole or a mere conceptual
ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in
the mind
of his average reader about reality. His
" " "
logical whole and his individuality as logi-
" "
cal completeness," work with him [Professor
Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily
an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm
of mind. But reality (as the whole world of
human work and human effort is there to
1
Treatise upon Human Nature, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i.
547).
NOTE
It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible
connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of
Dr. Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the
second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manu-
script of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect
its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has
impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus
learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay
or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to
indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the human-
ists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of
Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and
Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I
232 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself
to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet's
books to its companion volume that appeared in the following
calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the
" "
existence of this second great Gifford book of his as to appear
to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do
many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as
things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or
have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny
of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the
reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of
Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July
numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to
my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo-
Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of
the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic
Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders
of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent
people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in
England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the
thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of "
the
chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet's second volume :The
Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness
"
of Persons," The Moulding of Souls," " The Miracle" of Will,"
"
the Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood," the Stability
"
and Security of Finite Selfhood," The Religious Consciousness,"
"The Destiny of the Finite Self," "The Gates of the Future."
There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all
" "
the high and deep discussion of the ideas of a lifetime that it
includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader
who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about
—
things a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory
both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy
must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find,
—
however this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr.
—
Bosanquet's power that the principles of argumentation that
determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have un-
dergone any modification in its success or successor indeed, what
;
is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but
a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to
"
finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls." If any one
will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the
non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of
philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent,
and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from
the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe
about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought
are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about con-
ceivability and about the principles"of contradiction and negation ;
"
secondly, that it is still the same whole of logic that is to it
the test of all reality and individuality ; and, thirdly, that it is,
PRAGMATISM AND RATIONALISM 233
again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon
some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical
principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his
Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although
it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made
the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail
of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing
" "
out that it is throughout such things as finite mind," the finite
mind " that is " best understood by approaching it from the side of
" " "
the continuum [the whole "], the "finite mind that is "shaped
"
by the universe," that is torn between existence and self-
" "
transcendence," appearance,"
"
an externality which is the
object of mind," the positive principle of totality
"
or individuality
" "
manifesting itself in a number of forms," good " and evil "
as
attitudes concerning a creature's whole being," volition in
"
terms of the principle that there is for every situation a larger
—
and more effective point of view than the given " that are dis-
cussed, and not the real
" persons who have what they call
minds " and " volitions " and " attitudes," and who invent all
these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their
experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him
Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that "
the
firstreality for all thought and speculation is not the logical
"
whole that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater
number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the
fives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse,
wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I
cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who
hold to the idea of the reality of the fives of the persons who are
agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which "
is for us the
Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake
of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism
(of hisIdealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too,
action" (ibid. 170). "We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing
with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether
it wants to treat the body or the life of the mind, it pro-
life of the
ceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument
not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy
teaches us much When we think of the cardinal,
in this matter.
urgent, and constant need we have
to preserve our bodies and to raise
our souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to
experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the palpable
injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a pedagogical practice
is made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity
and especially at the persistence of errors. We
may easily find their
origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the
lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the
sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the
immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterised by a natural inability
"
to comprehend life (Creative Evolution, p. 174).
(Italics mine.)
"
2
look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
I
qualities.
The supreme mistake of philosophy, according
to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of
"
affair of science, and not of philosophy (Creative Evolution, pp. 204-5).
[All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-
Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error
in their whole procedure here.]
1
Schopenhauer's phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer's
System.
2
It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there
are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that
are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of
Descartes —
Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed
philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy
of science upon which this protest of Bergson's against the excesses of
" "
conceptualism rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this
physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this new point
of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity which would
"
have to be defined in psychological terms (pp. 219-20, italics mine).
240 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening
up a broader and a deeper view of truth than
that afforded to the merely piece-meal and
utilitarian view.
As Actionism and the action philosophy
for the
of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any
other tendency of the day with the new life and
the new thought of the twentieth century, although
(like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction
or revision by the principles of a sound ethical
philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and can-
not be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday.
In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to
the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special
"
"
faculties (" sensation," perception," memory,"
" " " "
ideation," judgment," thinking," emotion,"
" *
and the rest) of the dynamic," instead of the
1
As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead of
the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the phrase
"
(or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory, the effect that matter
is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action," or the even more emphatic
"
declaration on p. 261 of Creative Evolution, There are no things, there
are only actions." It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts
can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same significance
that they obtain in their setting in the pages of Bergson, although it is
surely almost a matter of common knowledge about his teaching, that
one of the first things it does is to begin with the same activistic or
" "
actionistic view of nature and matter that seems to be the stock
in trade of the physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to
radio-activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be
excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very presence in the
series in which it appears is to people like myself a guarantee of its
scientific reliability) in which I find this same activistic view of
matter that I find in Bergson. " What are the processes by which the
primary rock material is shifted ? There is the wind that, etc. etc. . . .
There are the streams and rivers that, etc. There is the sea
. . .
'
We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former
works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary
physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness
is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work like
a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the detail of
analysis it is a convenient mode of expression.
; But it is nothing else.
In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It represents a certain
sum of contingency entering into the world, that is to say, a certain
—
quantity of possible action a quantity variable with individuals and
especially with species. The nervous system of an animal marks out
the flexible lines on which its action will run (although the potential
energy is accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system
itself) its nervous centres indicate, by their development and their
;
"
choice that the living being has at its disposal (Creative Evolution,
pp. 266-7).
" ' '
1
Instead of starting from affection [or sensation in the old
sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing, since
there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than anything else,
we start from action, that is to say, from our power of effecting changes
in things, a faculty attested by consciousness, and towards which all
the powers of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place
ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson as an
idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a con-
sciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than ourselves],
and in this material universe we perceive centres of indetermination
"
characteristic of life (Matter and Memory, p. 67). "
a
Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: The whole
personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the
when we are
"
most ourselves
" —when we act out
" "
freely own nature. To him the primary
our
fact for any human being is the life-impulse that
is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly
far more of a fundamental reality than any of
"
those entities or concepts (" cells," atoms,"
" "
forces," laws," or what not) which, with Kant,
he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect
for its descriptive and practical purposes. This
" " "
life is free in the sense that we are not deter-
"
mined by any or all of those forces and laws to
which our intellect subjects everything else, but
which it cannot apply to the life that is more than
mere matter, that is a real becoming and a
real process, a real creation and development.
"
The
spiritualism," again, of his interpreta-
tion of this life and activity rests, to begin with,
upon his opinion that the very inception of
the activity, and the adjustment, and the
selection in which the simplest life-effort, and
the simplest perception of a living being con-
sist,indicate the presence and the operation of a
1
controlling agency, or mind, or principle of
1 We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson's idea that living
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 245
" "
spiritual choice that is not, and cannot be,
explained on the principles mechanical science
of a
or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the
the creative activity, the elan vital
life-force, or
"
beings are centres of indetermination," that is to say, creatures who
"
hold their place in nature and that of their species by persisting in
"
their own being (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting
upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by
"
avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. They allow
" so to
to pass through them," he says, speak, those external influences
' '
by their very isolation" {Matter and Memory, pp. 28, 29) We also refer to .
Bergson's idea that the life-force has expressed itself along different
grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a
partial explanation of what we mean by
the presence of a spiritual
activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson's
idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of
life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description.
"
More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that Our representa-
tion of matter is the measure of our possible action upon bodies it ;
results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or
more generally for our functions" {Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that
" Consciousness" is *' "
just this choice of attaining to or attending to
"
" certain of the " material
parts and certain aspects of those parts
"
" is an" elementary
universe {ibid. p. 31), or that" sense-perception
"
question to my motor activity." The truth is that my nervous
affect my body and
system, interposed between the objects which
those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, sending
back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of an
enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the
centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass
from the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able
to make an appeal to my will, so to speak, an elementary
and to put,
motor such is what is termed a
question to
"
my activity. Every question
"
perception Or, as he puts it, on p. 313,
{ibid. 40, 41 ; italics mine).
No
doubt the choice of perception from among images in general is the
effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. But to touch the
. . .
another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When
we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter
for spirit."
246 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
of which we read so much in his books, that has
"seized upon matter," vitalizing it into force and
" "
energy, into the play upon each other of all
the varied activities and grades and forms of the
and into the various forms of socialized
will to live,
and co-operative living on the part of animals and
men. We shall immediately remark upon the
matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual
philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but
indicated or stated.
One of its essential features, so far as we are
at present concerned, is his claim that his in-
troduction of a spiritual principle into the life-
force, or the creative activity that has expressed
itself in the various grades and forms of life, both
animal and human, is not a phase of the old philo-
1 " "
sophy or theology of final causes or of a pre-
"
determined 2 teleology." To this old finalism or
" "
always able to detect the relapses even of mechanism
1 is
Bergson
"
and of the mechanical philosophy of science into finalism," as
"
when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution, To sum up, if the
accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible varia-
tions, —
some good genius must be appealed to the genius of the future
species
—
in order to preserve and accumulate these variations, for
" selection " will not look after this.
If, on the other hand, the acci-
dental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on,
or for anew function to take its place, all the changes that have
happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back
on the good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous
changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of succes-
sive variations."
2
We must remember that toBergson evolution has taken place
along different lines — those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in
animal and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals), and
life),
that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors either of
materialism, or of
"
Darwinism " (the belief in " accidental variations "),
"
or of the design-philosophy," or even of theories like neo-Lamarckian-
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 247
1 " "
teleology the of organic nature (the
life organs
" " "
and cells," the instinctive actions, and the
" "
adjustments of animals, and so on) were all
due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating
intelligence operating upon matter whereas to ;
"
ism or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are but imperfect
"
and " life
"
and hypothetical attempts to grasp " movement which
"
both transcend finality, if we understand by finality the realisation of
an idea conceived or conceivable in advance" (Creative Evolution, p. 236).
" " " "
1
Paleyism or Miltonism are still good names for the thing,
I have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
2
See below, p. 261.
248 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
of the results that would accrue from it to the
constructive philosophy in which we are interested
as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism.
Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh,
and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the
fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical *
character of the analyses to which our world
is subjected by the science and by the technic
"
and the supposed " economy of our present
2
culture. Then an equally new and equally
1 To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of
science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincare, and
Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example,
"
from Matter and Memory (p. 263) We shall never explain by
:
—
the corpus, the body itself the actions and reactions of this body
with regard to all the others. This is precisely the object of chemistry.
It studies bodies rather than matter and so we understand why it stops
;
"
1
I find this in Bergson's whole attribution of much of our per-
" " " "
ceptual and scientific knowledge of things to the needs of
action," and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236-238 to
indicate for his polemic against rationalism.
2
This confirmation I find in Bergson's whole philosophy of per-
ception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a living
" " "
being as a centre of action or a centre of indetermination." In
fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the upholders
of the "freedom" of the life of the individual, and of the fact that
each new individual contributes something new of its own to the sum-
total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life of the world.
Of course there is no more an explanation
in his teaching of the causes
"
of variation" or the differences at birth between the off-spring of
men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.
250 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
of the individual and upon the necessity, on the
" " "
part of philosophy, of a dynamic or motive-
" 1 2
awakening theory of reality, (7) their insistence
1
The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson's whole philosophy
of man's life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting of obstacles,
as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life of nature, upon the life
of the human species as such, upon the infinite life and energy and
"
love
"
of God —
if we may soar to this great thought. See, for
" "
example, what he writes in explanation of the discordance of
which he speaks thus "
Our freedom, in the very movements by
:
automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusi-
asm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed
into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so easily
the shape of the other, that we might confuse them together, doubt
our sincerity, deny goodness and love." The explanatory words are
the following. [They are quite typical of the kind of philosophy of life
that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of the name of a philosophy of
" " "
the living. And the reference to love," as the highest dynamic
"
force in this world of ours, occurs at their close.] The profound cause
of this discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life
is general, is mobility itself ; particular manifestations of life accept
this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always
going ahead they want to mark time. Evolution in general would
;
fain go on
a straight line
in each special evolution is a kind of circle.
;
Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn on
themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore
relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each
of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very
permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times,
however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is
materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination before
certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most animals so touching,
observable even in the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This love >
in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us
life's secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation
that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living
being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the
movement by which life is transmitted " (Creative Evolution, pp. 134-5 >
1
Cf. p. 235.
"
2
Cf. We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to
the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the
mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the
"
function of philosophy (Creative Evolution, p. 31).
3 "
So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has
no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the con-
ventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that
veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself "
'
the representation.' This conception of matter is simply that of
common sense." ..." For common sense, then, the object exists in
itself,and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial, as we
perceive it :
image it is, but a self-existing image." Now, this very idea
" "
of a self-existing image implies to me the whole idealism of philo-
sophy, and Bergson is not free of it And, of course, as we have surely
" "
seen, his creative-evolution philosophy is a stupendous piece of
idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the day is
also inclining.
17
258 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
2
for example, that he does not do justice to the
social factor in human development of which we
have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the
sociologists.
3
We
might mean, however, and we
do in a sense mean that he has not made as much
as he might have done of this factor, by develop-
ing for the thought of to-day the reality of that
"
world of
"
spiritual communion and " inter-
1There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching,
that he is but little affected by formal criticism.
2
Cf.
" We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of
human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual
in isolation, without taking account of social life. In reality man is a
being who lives in society. If it be true [even] that the human intellect
aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as other purposes,
it is associated with other intellects. Now it is difficult to imagine a
society whose members do not communicate by signs," etc. etc.
(Creative Evolution, p. 166). Indeed all readers of Bergson know
"
that he is constantly making use of the social factor and of co-opera-
"
tion by way of accounting for the general advance of mankind. It
may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the magnificent
passage towards the close of Creative Evolution in which he rises to the
very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had it before him,
and also before the socialists and the collectivists] of humanity's being
possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the obstacles that beset
it onward path " As the smallest grain of dust [Creative Evolution,
in its :
pp. 285-6] is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with
it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself,
so organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, ... do but
all
evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter,
and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to
the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant,
man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in
time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind
each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down every resistance
and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."
p. 160 and p. 262.
3 Cf.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON 259
"
subjective intercourse of which we have spoken
more than once.
Then we might contend that Bergson has
also
not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken
much cognizance of the deeper x experiences of
of the specifically ethical and religious feelings
life,
1
He comes some of them, as he often does of so many
in sight of
"
things. It is a vague and formless being, whom we may call,
as if
way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and
even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive
and above the accidents of evolution."
2
From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from
the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier
and the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing
to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would
perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted
more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more repre-
sentative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.
17a
260 PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM
spiritualism and libertarianism of French philo-
sophy, we may think of the voluntarism of Kant
and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat
against the idea of Bergson's
1
in
originality
philosophy. Despite this it
possible is still to
regard him as one of important, modern, exponents
of just that development of the Kantian
philosophy
that became imperative after Darwinism. He
has indeed inaugurated for us that
reading of the
' " "
theory of knowledge in terms of the
" 2 theory
of life which is his true and real continua-
1
We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson
claim any great originality for his many illuminative
points of view.
He is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the
history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man in
living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of the day)
for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome of a broad
study of the considerations of science and of history and of criticism.
By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific work upon
biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in fact (as seen
" "
by naturalists) for the creative evolution upon which Bergson bases
"
his philosophy, I append the
following : We
have gone far enough
to see that the development of an
organism from an egg is a truly
wonderful process. We need but go back again and look at the marvel-
lous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do cells
differentiate, but cell-groups act together like well-drilled battalions,
cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming protective coverings
or communicating channels,
apparently creating out of nothing, a whole
set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all in
orderly and progressive
sequence, producing in the end that orderly disposed cell aggregate,
that individual life unit which we know as an earthworm.
Although
the forces involved are beyond our ken, the "
grosser processes are evident
(Needham, General Biology, p. 175; italics mine). Of course it is
evident from his books that Bergson does not take much account of
such difficult facts and topics as the mistakes of instinct, etc. And
I have just
spoken of his optimistic avoidance of some of the deeper
problems of the moral and spiritual life of man.
2 "
This amounts to saying that the theory of
knowledge and theory
of seem to us inseparable [Creative Evolution, p. xiii. italics
life ;
understanding puts at its disposal it can but enclose the facts, willing
:
267
268 INDEX
Lecky, 70 theory of truth, 127 ; its theory
Leighton (Prof.), 133 of reality, 135
Le Roy, 31 Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127
Locke, 61, 119
Radical Empiricism, 85
Lovejoy (Prof.), 49
Renan, no
MacEachran (Prof.), 49 n. Renouvier, 29
Mach, 40 Rey, 31
Mackenzie, J. S., 112 Riley, W., 26 n.
Maeterlinck, 90 Ritzsche, 45
Mallarme, 214 Royce, J., 54
Marett, 160 Russell, B., 61, 66 n., 169
Mastermann, G. F. G., 118
Santayana, 171, 181, 190
M'Dougall, 104
Schellwien, 44
McTaggart, J. M. E., 92
Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132,
Meaning, 21, 51, 149
133
Mellone, 57
Schinz, 192 n.
Merz, 157
Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260
Munsterberg, 46
Seth, James, 14 n.
Seth-Haldane, 260
Natorp, 48
Needham (Prof.), 101, 260 Shaw, Bernard, 124
New Realism, 53 Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 n., 140
Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151 Sigwart, 42
Simmel, 44
Ostwald, 40, 41 Spencer, 41 m,
Starbuck, 28
Pace (Prof.), 187 Stoicism, 118
Paleyism, 247 Stout, G. F., 55
Papini, 24, 135 Subjective Idealism, 259
Pascal, 119
Pater, W., 124 Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 n., 2 19
Peirce, 3, 22 Teleology, 88, 198
Tertullian, 119
Perry (Prof.), 53, 185
Perry, Bliss, 171, 179
Theism, 215 n.
Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151 Themistius, 155
Pluralism, 87 Thompson, J. H., 144
Poincare, 30 Titchener, 157
Pradines, 36 n. Truth, 59, 81, 163
Tufts, 147
Pragmatism, and American philo-
sophy, 49, chap. vii. and ;
Tyndall, no
British thought, 54 and ;
Vaihinger, 39
French thought, 28 and Ger-
;